Its founder, Ricardo Santa Cruz, realized that only through cooperation with the local community could the resort guarantee the honest preservation of Chalacatepec’s flora and fauna. With the help of scientists, neighbors and friends in the hospitality industry, Santa Cruz has managed to build a resort that not only meets the needs of the most discerning travelers but also contributes to the collective prosperity of the area. Xala is involved in conserving turtle nesting hotspots, restoring estuaries, and purifying pesticide-damaged land, among other conservation activities.

Like Xala, there are already a multitude of tourism projects around the world that are applying sustainable strategies focused on the empowerment of local communities. In this article, we explain how a “local” approach is the best option for the hospitality industry to become truly sustainable.

If every time you talk about why you want to study Fine Arts instead of Law your parents give you a disappointed look, you might want to mention a couple of the arguments below.

Creative jobs are on the rise.
And they are well paid (or at least better paid than 10 years ago).

Gone are the days when it was considered that an artist did not mind working for free. We are slowly reclaiming the right that should always have been ours: the recognition of our contribution to society.

As the pandemic turned lawyers and engineers into spontaneous chefs broadcasting their recipes on YouTube and abstract painters selling their pieces as NFTs, the world began to realize that the role of creativity in society transcends that of mere entertainment and is, in fact, a matter of life and death (or a matter of staying sane or going nuts, if one wants to sound less melodramatic).

I first became interested in hallucinogens when I was living in London. A friend had just experienced his first LSD trip a few days ago. “It was the most introspective experience I’ve ever had.” He told me, “I suddenly knew exactly what I had to do with my life.” That triggered my curiosity. At that time I was going through a period of personal and professional uncertainty. The promise of clarity definitely sounded enticing.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone praise psychedelics in London. The British capital is one of the cities with the highest drug consumption per capita in the world and its use is a recurring topic of discussion on the street. From this point on, I began to attend debates, watch movies, and visit exhibits on the healing qualities of hallucinogens.

It turns out that most of the people I spoke to during this time were using psychedelics in the same way and for the same purpose: sporadically and for a spiritual experience.